The American Spectator . . ."This statement to the media contains some disturbing elements. First, Biden suggests that he was initially briefed on the balloon on Wednesday. The problem with this claim is that it entered U.S. air space in January, as reported in the Bloomberg article quoted above: “US authorities were well aware of the unidentified object that had entered American airspace on Jan. 28.” This means either that Biden is guilty of another of his trademark whoppers or, even worse, that his military advisers hid it from him for several days. The latter explanation seems eminently plausible considering that “they decided” when to shoot it down.
"Regardless of who made the call, the decision to allow the balloon to traverse the entire continent before destroying it was allegedly based on the desire to avoid collateral damage if debris happened to fall on a populated area. That claim, however, is simply not credible. During its first four days over the U.S., there were vast stretches of virtually uninhabited territory over which it could have been shot down with no serious possibility of collateral damage. It could also have been shot down over water even before it entered U.S. air space in Alaska. As former Vice Chief of Staff of the United States Army Gen. Jack Keane told Fox News:
Remember, this was approaching the United States over water. It was approaching the Aleutian Islands over water. And we had plenty of opportunity to take it down then. And that’s when it should have happened. We had to be tracking it from mainland China across the Pacific Ocean, and we had plenty of warning to put together an operation that we are conducting now on the East Coast that should have been done there.
"Keane goes on to point out that we have alert aircraft in Alaska whose principal mission is to prevent unauthorized penetration of U.S. air space by foreign aircraft. If we had competent leadership in the White House, the spy balloon would never have made it to Alaska. But that’s the problem, of course. As Robert Gates, former defense secretary in the Obama administration, famously observed, “[Biden] has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” Our commander-in-chief has certainly lived up to this reputation during his first two years in the White House.". . .
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